The PDO support is going well, but unfortunately there have been too many distractions tonight, and I haven’t had time to finish it off.
One of the distractions has been an on-going attack from a blog spammer. His zombie network is pretty good - he keeps up a steady hit rate, and every time I ban one of his IP addresses on the firewall, another one takes its place in seconds. I’ve had to remove all the blog features he was spamming (stats mainly), and I’ve had to add a bit of code to b2evo to spot the common features of the spam attack, and so automatically reject connections from the bugger.
One amusing point is that the User_Agent strings of the zombie boxes in the weblogs are all from Windows boxes. Ah - Microsoft’s great gift to the Internet - zombie farms for hire. Doesn’t matter if Windows Vista finally puts an end to new infections; there are enough machines out there which will never be upgraded to ensure the problem will persist for years to come.
Makes me wish I could bill Microsoft for all the time I’ve spent dealing with the consequences of their previous security attempts.
It’s quite funny, isn’t it? If Microsoft made toasters that gave a nasty electrical shock because they hadn’t been earthed properly, you could win compensation from them for the material distress caused. But, because it’s software, there’s effectively no comeback at all.
And what makes it funny is that projects like Gentoo rely on that same circumstance for their very existance. If all software projects had to provide the same sort of consumer warranties by law that go with physical goods, opensource projects (and many commercial software firms for that matter) couldn’t survive as they do today.
And on that thought I’m off to bed.
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